Sarah Sands on her incredible career - and asking monks how they stay so cal‪m‬

The Sunday Salon with Alice-Azania Jarvis

Sarah Sands is a media industry legend. A trailblazer for women in journalism, she has had one of the most glittering careers it’s possible to have - editing two newspapers before going on to head up BBC Radio 4’s flagship current affairs programme, Today. Having left that role last year, she’d be forgiven for putting her feet up. But no - she has just published The Interior Silence: 10 Lessons from Monastic Life. The book moves between her frenetic journalism career - buzzing along on six hours sleep, dealing with endless emails, breaking news and tweets - and her quest to discover the kind of inner calm more often seen among monks and nuns. It’s a really fun, fascinating read - written in a kind of travelogue style, with bits of history, culture and monastic life interwoven with anecdotes from Sarah’s busy, high-powered professional world. I lapped it up - and absolutely loved interviewing Sarah about everything from her start in journalism, holding her own in what was then a very male-dominated environment while also being a young single mother, making it to the top as the editor of The Sunday Telegraph - only to lose her job eight months later, reaching the pinnacle again as editor of the Evening Standard and then at the Today programme - and much, much more. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Buy the book: https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-interior-silence/sarah-sands/9781780724546

Twitter: @aliceazania / @sarahsands100

Edited by Chelsey Moore